Today in History: Remembering Georgia O’Keeffe

Fittingly dressed as one’s biography, it is the day to present to the classroom. Babe Ruth, Marie Curie, and Queen Elizabeth file ceremoniously through the doors, but the school greeter — cum artist-teacher, casts his eye quickly to the back of the entrance line and smiles in surprise, recognizing, recollecting, and yes, approving the choice. She sports a beret and carries a palette whose bright blotches contrast with her stark attire — pure black, from head to foot — a long skirt and long-sleeved top, fashioned together from her mother’s old clothes. It is like a collage of school, work, and home, for when our daughter selected her subject a couple of months earlier, I could share the exciting connection to Teachers College, an institution which, through my many years of service, is a very part of my bones.

The “Mother of American Modernism”, Georgia O’Keeffe died on March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was known for her body innovative art, which included paintings of flowers, city and landscapes, and images of bones in the desert. For a short period of time O’Keeffe attended Teachers College, where she studied under Arthur Welsey Dow, American painter, printmaker, photographer and influential arts educator.

Interested in what we have on Georgia O’Keeffe at Teachers College? See here for related entries in Pocketknowledge, our institutional archive and here for records in Educat, our catalog. Conducting a Supersearch across all the databases to which Teachers College subscribes will yield much more!

Interested in additional archival materials? Check out ArchiveGrid, the open source platform for searching archival records in WorldCat, a consortium of academic, public, and research libraries. See here for entries on Georgia O’Keeffe.

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